Pagination - not displaying results properly, please help!

I am desperate to find an answer to this problem. I have read through (and tried to use) anout 6 different tutorials, but I just cannot fix this. It would mean so much to me if someone could tell me what I am doing wrong, my brain is really starting to hurt over this!!

I have a search (for realestate), that results in all the properties for the search criteria to show up (eg state, price etc etc). I wanted to limit the number of properties per page to 3, and to have links saying, "next 1, 2, 3, 4" etc etc. Now I know it has something to do with limits, but I can't get it to work.

If I put $limit = $maxRows_p it says:
'showing results 1 - 3 of 3'. But there are actually 16 results available. When I Take out the $limit I get:
the correct 'showing 1 - 3 of 16' but all the results are on the first page. (doesn't limit it to 3).

Thanks so much for your response, this issue has been causing me grief for days now. What do you mean by code tags? Please let me know and I'll try to fix it up. I have had a look at your example, and tried to use some stuff from it instead, but I still come up with the same issues.
I've looked through heaps of tutes, but no matter what I try it doesn't seem to work. What I have come up with is truly the best I can do :sad:

If you could help me out my looking at my code, I would truly, truly appreciate it :o

Ok I have attempted :confused: the code you sent above, and I also couldn't get it to work. Now, I am getting all the results showing on the first page, a next link that doesn't work and it says, " showing 1 of listings"